by Todd Brendan Fahey originally appeared in the March 1991 issue of Fling

I remember very crisply my introduction to the cult of Hunter S. Thompson. Having already broasted the front side of my body under a thin ozone layer one warm August afternoon in Santa Barbara, I traded my beach chair for a… Read more »

At the behest of a notable film producer/executive producer, I have been urged to synopsize this tale which combines psychedelic aspects of the CIA's Project MK-Ultra and its effect on the Sixties. All screenwriters' advice, and that of synopsis weavers, is to "keep the synopsis true to the voice of the original work." ...and, boy howdy, have I.

Wisdom's Maw will be one of those "two hours that will change your way of thinking."

On Friday, the Justice Department closed its two-year investigation into the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status and decided to charge . . . no one.

This, when Lerner admitted the IRS had singled out righty groups, but blamed the “absolutely inappropriate” actions on “front-line people” — that is, lower-level folks. And then refused to answer more questions by pleading the Fifth.

Questions about, say, her orders to hold up applications from any outfit with “Tea Party” or “patriot” in its name.

In a letter Friday, Justice told Congress: “We found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution.”

In other words, exactly what President Obama ordered up — er, predicted. Back when the “investigation” had barely started, Obama told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly there wasn’t “even a smidgen of corruption” in the case. On “The Daily Show,” he explained that the “real scandal” is that the IRS lacks the budget to do more audits.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a member of the House Oversight Committee, notes: “Here’s a lady who systematically and for a sustained period of time targeted people for exercising their most fundamental rights, their First Amendment free-speech rights. … The chief investigator, the chief lawyer assigned to the Justice Department to evaluate this, was Barbara Bosserman — a maxed-out contributor to the president’s campaign.”

“So it shouldn’t be any surprise the Justice Department said there’s nothing wrong here. But the American people know that there is.”

Wondering what the FBI probe will conclude about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private account and server for all her State Department e-mails? Well, Obama already told CBS’s Steve Kroft that it didn’t make for a “national security problem. . . I can tell you that this is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.”

If the Lois Lerner case is any precedent, the FBI might as well wrap up its Clinton probe right now.

The bastion of Totalitarian Collectivism is based upon a culture of political correctness. Before authoritarians impose their rigid formulas for shaping and defining a false reality, the ground needs to be prepared for molding public opinion. The details and narrative of mind control works best when people have already adopted an urbanity of collective singularity. The nature of “TC” is the next level beyond political correctness.

Peer pressure may be expected during school adolescence but part of growing up requires a level of maturity to distinguish between facts, moral conduct and social values arrived at through sound and rigorous intellectual scrutiny. The primary source of mental malady comes out of media. As the media covers their daily inventions from papier-mâché substance from toilet paper sagas the public sinks deeper into the fog of war. The conflict that pervades the minds of the remaining rational thinkers becomes a struggle for survival.

Analyzing the merits of the dished out information from the media barons, is an experience like being put on the “Strappado Wrack” of political torture. While these media outlets share the spotlight that places the focus on the intended outcome, the strings of propaganda are being pulled by government intervention in the reporting process.

Rarely are the barbs of establishment mass medium used as an attack on the ruling elites. When a lonely threat rises out of the “PC” orthodoxy, the reams of paper used to put down a rabid dog come at no expense. Protecting the appointed order is the purpose behind professing the conformity of compliance.

Eradication of dissent is the supreme use of applying political correctness to the national consciousness. One way or the highway has become stick to your side of the center line or get run off the road. Meaningful political discourse is almost impossible in an environment where socialized purity has become a fatal blood disease. The Sepsis condition caused by an overwhelming immune response to accepting a fictitious version of certainty is a terminal infection.

A glaring example of the beginnings of an upside down world is outlined in Political correctness has replaced British Politics! It is noteworthy that the two primary totalitarian European regimes of the twentieth century were engaged in their own versions of ideology dogma.

So how did it all start? Political Correctness started in a think tank (called The Frankfurt School) in Germany in 1923. The purpose was to find a solution to the biggest problem facing the implementers of communism in Russia. Why wasn't the wonderful idea of communism spreading? Read the short history here, the full history and purpose here or watch a 22 minute documentary here.

The Frankfurt school recommended (amongst other things):

the creation of racism offences

continual change to create confusion

the teaching of sex and homosexuality to children

the undermining of schools and teachers' authority

huge immigration to destroy national identity

the promotion of excessive drinking

emptying the churches

an unreliable legal system with bias against the victim of crime

dependency on the state or state benefits

control and dumbing down of media

encouraging the breakdown of the family

It was no coincidence that the same themes of cultural destruction affect the British Empire after the “so called” victory over fascism. The cultural Marxism that emerged in the post war era has an undisputed record of causing the decline and destruction of Western Civilization.

Missing in the conformist and accepted version of recent history is the role and influence of the tribal architects of de-constructing traditional values and Christian heritage. Admitting the linkage of the war on humanity with the tenants of “Political Correctness” is a crucial step in the bitter struggle to overcome the movement to stamp out the free exchange of knowledge and backdrop of our common bonds.

In a series of videos from Red Ice Creations, entitled Minority Rule: The Rise of Political Correctness is an unfinished documentary directed by the late Byron Jost (A Line in the Sand). The focus of the documentary is the role of the organized Jewish community in creating political correctness. Interviewees include Dr. Kevin MacDonald, Dr. E. Michael Jones, Dr. James Sanchez, and Canadian free speech activist Paul Fromm.

Review the evidence and ask who exactly benefits from the devastating dismantling of our European legacy? A “PC” culture is not compatible with individual freedom or social liberty.

The last fifty years has seen the acceleration of attacks on all aspects of Western thought, morals and political discourse. In a New Yorker essay, Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say, Jonathan Chait is quoted: “The PC movement has assumed a towering presence in the psychic space of politically active people in general and the left in particular.

“Chait defines this new political correctness as mainly an internecine war among liberals, where "more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate". It is at its heart, he says, illiberal and anti-free speech.

Among the examples he cites of modern-day PC extremism are calls for white males to "check their privilege"; trigger warnings on articles and college curricula; small slights called "microagressions" that, taken together, create a hostile environment for the unempowered; demands for inclusive language for trans-gendered persons; and protests that have prevented controversial lecturers from appearing on university campuses.”

Sincere traditionalists defend free speech, but the war against true American values and a rational way of life was started by the very pseudo intellectuals, who are converts to the sick and demented collectivist handbook written in a Marxist language and implemented by the monolith media and education indoctrination structure.

The natural counter weight to such an endemic perversion can be seen in the Donald Trump phenomena. “PC” is grounded in culture but is realized in economic despotism.

“Trump’s economic policies and theoretical framework challenge the Establishment’s basic operating assumptions to the core. The Establishment economic policy is globalist neoliberalism. They want to decrease the importance of national borders and national sovereignty in order to make the world safer for international finance and commerce, hence their support for mass immigration and sovereignty compromising “free trade” deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Trump’s opposition to “free trade” deals and open borders and unabashed advocacy of economic nationalism directly challenges the Establishment consensus in a way that no other candidate dose. All the major candidates in both parties with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders actually take Establishment neoliberal presumptions for granted.”

Trump, the person is not the issue, but his economic nationalism is at the core in the clash against the “PC” war against civilization. The Radical Reactionary column, Playing the Trump Card for Political Correctnessaddressed the initial reaction to his candidacy. Since that time excitement has transitioned into a movement. The “Silent Majority” that gathered to attend the Mobile, Alabama rally understand that the enemy of the nation is the mindset that talks tolerance, while advocating and promoting the elimination of all that is worth preserving and defending.

“America today is replete with cowards who are afraid to "tell it like it is." Fortunately, one of the rare truth tellers is running for President. Let's see if the American people want the truth or if they want to maintain their belief in fiction, supported only by politically correct lies.

Today, our problems are so severe, it is time for not only tough talk, but, more importantly, strong action. Political correctness is a very serious affliction that has done incredible damage to our country. It will eventually destroy America if it is not pulled up by the roots and finally eradicated.”

Are you one of those cowards who are so timid to think about, much less, discuss the origins of the “PC” doctrine? Progressive academia is a sewer of tribal censorship. The stakes cannot be higher. The very survival of our society is being shattered by allowing the “PC” proponents from going unchallenged.

The enthusiasm for Trump recognizes leadership and guts. To paraphrase Douglas MacArthur, there is no substitute for results.

For any citizen who has retained even the most modest level of brain cells, you must see the truth in the Trump statement: “You know, this country is so politically correct. Nobody wants to take a stance on anything."

Now you know this is the prevailing posture for professional politicians, but what about you, your family, neighbors and fellow workers? There is no escape from the combat. The totalitarian collectivists are dedicated to your destruction. You are neither a victim nor a bully, but a target for elimination. Act accordingly at your own peril.

- See more at: http://www.batr.org/totalitariancollectivism/082515.html#sthash.OgvQnhKb.dpuf

We all remember her as the "foreign exchange student from Czechoslovakia" in the smash hit American Pie; though not directly responsible, she has caused more untidiness in the bedrooms of adolescent males and grown men than...well, probably than any girlfriend or wife has ever accomplished. Actress Shannon Elizabeth recently wrapped up the filming of Swing Away--a golf comedy with romance and heart--and which has been produced by my 30-year pal George Elias Stephanopoulos, who I met while in a "semester-abroad" program at University of London-Union College in 1985; an attorney by day/indie movie powerhouse somehow in his other hours, Mr. Stephanopoulos successfully optioned the world's bestselling golf novel, Golf in the Kingdom--written by Michael Murphy, who founded Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California--an enclave of meditation, psychedelic exploration and goings-on which are likely Classified. Golf in the Kingdom was optioned by Clint Eastwood and explored for a decade; then purchased by Warner-Brothers and sat upon for years. From pen to theater audiences, 40 years would pass.

Invited to the isle of Rhodes, Greece in May for 11 days by George Elias Stephanopoulos, I was privileged to interview the cast of Swing Away--an exceptional group of minds, which include several of the most-acclaimed actors of Greece; an incredibly talented Scottish actor/comedian/singer-songwriter and the incomparable John O'Hurley (Seinfeld's recurring "J. Peterman"), a lightning-quick mind and who I will deem now a genius.

*All (or most...) photos and videos taken on and around the set of Swing Away are proprietary by contract, and hence the delay in mine reportage of these wonderful days, "hanging out and Dancing With the Stars."

Shannon Elizabeth: My character is Zoe Papadopoulos and she’s a golf pro on the LPGA tour who gets suspended for bad behavior and escapes to visit her grandparents in Greece to regroup and find herself again while riding out her suspension.

How did you learn of this movie, and what made you interested in portraying the role of Zoe?

The film was brought to me over a year ago by the producers. I met with a previous director and then Michael Nickles who came on board as our final director and fearless leader. I read many rewrites of the script and once Michael came on board and got his hands on the script, I was sold. I also had the pleasure of meeting Manos Gavras in LA over a year ago and his involvement and passion for the project and working with me made me excited to work on the film too. It’s always good to work with good people who have a similar vision as you do for the project.

Are their any parallels to your own life which you could bring/draw upon for the development of the character of Zoe?

There are many parallels to this character and my own life. I am a very competitive tomboy type of girl, just like Zoe. I played professional poker and competitive tennis growing up. So the athlete has always been a part of me. I also am a very passionate person with an occasional temper, just like Zoe. I’m also a caregiver, nurturer type. So playing a role who gets to help people and take care of the village and this little girl was such a nice change from some of my past roles. I felt like I was getting to play something much closer to who I am.

Director Mike Nickles made a point in his interview with me, that he is happy to allow actors (generic, both male and female) to bring to the script ideas which would make a better movie; please tell of some examples that you witnessed of this occurring while shooting Swing Away

Michael was always open to hearing our ideas about what the character might say or do in any situation if we wanted to change things a bit. He was very collaborative. Especially because there were daily rewrites being done and sometimes things needed to be cut down. So he was always considering all opinions on what was important to the character or storylines and what wasn’t.

This being a movie with a cast of predominately Greek actors (and being produced by Greek-American and Greek producers/investors), what did you see in the performances of the Greek cast which was unique and different from your previous experience with actors?

It was a lot of fun for me to be able to work on a film where a lot of the dialog was in another language, including my own. I was able to watch the passion that comes through in the Greek actors when they’re speaking Greek and what they do with their hands and voice when they speak. It really helped me when it came time for me to say my lines in Greek.

Of young performer Viktoria Miller, who plays golf prodigy Stella, please describe your experience with her--both as characters and as humans on- and off-set.

Victoria and I became very close. If I had a daughter I’d imaging her being just like Victoria. She’s an absolute love and a very bright girl. You could see her constantly watching us and registering things in her mind and then implementing them as an actress. Her memory is incredible. What she was able to do by the end of the movie was very evolved from the beginning, just from immersing herself in the experience. She’s got a very bright future ahead of her no matter what she decides to do.

Political conservatives with a high degree of business savvy are able to see through the facade which Fox News has become. The recent orchestration of the Republican presidential debate was a huge ratings success hitting a record 24 million viewers. The early debate gained 6.1 million eyeballs. The contrast between the two venues could not be greater. The high level of discourse among the seven second tier candidates far surpassed the P.T. Barnum spectacular, which was scripted as an episode of desperately seeking jumbo. The GOP establishment elephant was center stage, but the RINO’s suffer from myopia as they disrespect grassroots conservatives.

The business of mega media political productions rakes in the loot. Yet, the Roger Ailes version of “Wag the Dog” screenplay using a frenzied crowd of spectators as a backdrop exemplifies that entertainment values trump substance dialogue. The lesson that was grippingly vivid is that the network motto, We Report, You Decide no longer applies, especially when the objective is to bushwhack opponents that may pose a threat to the Jeb Bush dynasty.

The good news is that the theatrics backfired with genuine conservatives. The righteous anger towards the establishment is real and deep. No matter what one thinks of Donald Trump, the attention galvanized that opposes open borders and destructive free trade agreements has lifted this campaign cycle to substantive issues.

Fox News sunk to an all-time low that will linger and discredit their brand for years to come.

“Levin objected to the format where in which we heard six or seven minutes each from the ten candidates, and a third of the time the Fox moderators dominated the event. Fox brags they had 24 million viewers, he pointed out, but he concluded that it amounted to an “embarrassment as far as I’m concerned… while the New York Times and CNN praised the event, I considered it an exploitation of the process, which is supposed to inform the American people. Not gotcha questions, not gossip… I think the American people are owed an apology.”

“When did that become the job of a “moderator” who is supposed to be more of a referee than a middle linebacker?

Who decided to turn the first Republican presidential debate into a two-hour version of “The Kelly File”?”

That’s exactly why sincere Americans need to turn their backs on the propaganda and newspeak of the mass media whose mission is to protect and serve the financial corporatist elite. The 9:00 PM debate was not a high water mark of journalism, but was a giant step into the quicksand of disgust and distrust.

While informed activists understand this viewpoint, the vast majority of the spoon feed serfs will hold onto their flimsy world view of political choices that are pushed down their throats. The columns, Donald Trump Won’t Win A War Against Fox News provides stats that should disturb any thinking person.

“According to a March Quinnipiac poll, 80 percent of Republicans say they trust Fox News either “a great deal” or “somewhat,” as compared to 16 percent who say they trust the network “not so much” or “not at all.” Those numbers are almost identical to the high marks Democrats give MSNBC and the other news networks.”

The destructive notion that any of the media conglomerates can be trusted to tell the truth is symptomatic of the sickness that prevails from a society boasting a government school education, a culture based upon television programming and an electorate that votes on the basis of celebrity recognition.

Now in a free enterprise system, making money is not a crime. The Tree of Liberty forum post suggests that the big show has financial rewards.

“Yesterday, nj.com reported on the New Jersey governor’s $250,000 ad buy on Fox News, and, today, the same source reported on an additional buy via Christie’s super PAC, America Leads, bringing the governor’s total to $1 million in Fox News advertising.”

What is amazing from a debate format, hosted by broadcast and cable networks is packaging the hyped up drama and injected controversy is the model for marketing of a presidential debate reality show that has more in common with an episode of House of Cards, than a serious dialogue on issues.

Personality has obviously become more important than debating the future of the country. In the Marshall McLuhan media age “The Medium is the Message”, and now in the tweeter environment, the initial public reaction is based upon the slimmest of intellectual acumen.

“The Facebook co-sponsorship increased interactions on the Fox News Channel’s Facebook page view by 74 percent from a typical day in July. The 10 million Facebook video views were up 190 percent compared to the daily July 2015 average.

By broadening Fox’s audience, which skews conservative, with Facebook’s users, who skew liberal, Ailes demonstrated that on-air news can thrive from a connected and mobile-screen experience.”

How far this country has fallen since the orderly, informative and substantive debates dating back to the last century when the League of Women Voters provided the organization. From their October 3, 1988 press release, Withdraws Support from Final Presidential Debate.

"It has become clear to us that the candidates' organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and honest answers to tough questions," Neuman said. "The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public."

Into this void, the likes of Fox News jumped in with both feet. Show business replaced honest News reporting.

- See more at: http://www.batr.org/corporatocracy/081215.html#sthash.WtiL8Az8.dpuf

He was that kid in the fourth grade and you could always get the answers from him on a test; he knew what made the mood ring work (“Thermochromism,” of course: “They use it in baby bottles, so your little brother doesn’t scald his lips if yer Mom loads it too hot…y’know, just because she’s yer Mom doesn’t mean she knows everything…”). By high school, he’d be able to give advice to the cheerleaders as regards relative efficacy (and side effects) of IUDs vs. The Pill: Just because he read a lot.

You’d see him from time-to-time—on a lacrosse field, where he was probably team captain (and you were only sitting nearby, killing off a beer and getting a tan); or after graduating…he’d be cutting up ClipArt for a ‘zine he was making in a tony loft high above the stank of Skid Row, and you’d bump into him on the way to score acid from another flat-mate in the next room. He’d always smile.

You knew he’d hit it big—and he did, like when he got a gig writing for Playboy magazine…for five or six years; that he married the prettier sister of Christy Canyon was just to be expected. He’d get you backstage passes to the O’Farrell Theater, too—but he couldn’t join in for that Board Meeting in Palo Alto or Menlo Park or wherever. Something in his DNA, was what you had always suspected. As drinks the Irishman, Mark Frauenfelder just always had it: The Algorithm of Geek.

Todd Brendan Fahey: You seem to be that kid who brought something new to school every week, and whom other kids grouped around to check out the New, Cool & Weird. Am I off in my assessment? If not, tell us about when you first began becoming aware of this aspect of your being; what “new shit” were you discovering before any of your other youthful peers were? And how did this lead to the novelty bent that is bOING bOING/Boing Boing?

Mark Frauenfelder: Probably 1974, when my dad brought home an HP, I think it was an HP 65 program called “Calculator”—it was a calculator that used these magnetic cards to load programs into it, and I remember it came with a moon-landing program—a simulation—and you would enter the amount of fuel that you wanted to use up as you were trying to land a lunar lander on the moon without having it crash into the surface of the moon…in other words, to get a soft landing. I was just fascinated by that.

I think around that same time was when the first issue of Kamandi, by Jack Kirby, came out, and that’s when I started falling in love with comics. Before that, I was just reading things like Richie Rich and Archie and wasn’t really that interested in superhero comics, and then when Kamandi came out it changed my whole view of what comic books could be and what they could accomplish. I really loved it.

And so those two things, I think—computers and comics—that kind of steered my life in that direction. After that, I was really into things like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Frank Frizetta; uh, shortly after that I started working at a comic book store and discovered underground comics at a pretty early age, loved the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and everything that Robert Crumb did, and that was, ah, you know, that was the beginning of a long love of alternative media and technology and other geeky things.

The craze of “‘zines” [Definition: Largely pulp, but sometimes embedded on floppies, indie journals, which ran the gamut of interests and fetishes] was the rave amongst twentysomethings of the early- to mid-1990s. One of the standouts, surely, was bOING bOING, which you created and which I was turned onto by a pal who was living in downtown Los Angeles at the time, while I was living in Santa Barbara. What inspired you to “start your own magazine” and what differentiated bOING bOING from the dozens/hundreds of other ‘zines which became assembled in the seminal ‘zine-list magazine Factsheet Five?

I learned about zines from an article in a 1987 issue of The Whole Earth Review (http://www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronic-edition.php?iss=2057) This issue was themed “Signal” and it was edited by Kevin Kelly. It was basically the prototype for Wired magazine, which Kevin co-founded in 1993. I was a mechanical engineer in San Jose at the time, not really liking my job, and this issue blew my mind. One of the articles was about zines written by Jeanne Carstensen. I was astonished by how many zines were out there. from the article I learned about Factsheet Five, a directory of zines. I ordered a copy and when through it was a highlighter, ordering dozens of zines by mail directly from the publisher. When I got them I was hooked. They were funky, and eclectic, and loaded with crazy outsider information. It inspired me to start self publishing. I made one issue of a zine called Important Science Journal, which was really just Crowleyania, Fortean phenomena, and secret societies. Then I did two issues of a mini-comic called Toilet Devil (Koko the talking ape calls people toilet devils when she is mad at them). Later that year my wife Carla and I decided to start a zine about cyberpunk, indy comics, brain technology and high weirdness. We named it bOING bOING because there were a few other zines out there with sound effects for names (Honk, Blab, etc) and we liked that.

Can we agree–or, do you feel that, as I do–the advent of the World Wide Web in 1994 took most hipsters minds off of indie print publications and subsequently sucked the life straight out of “the ‘zine movement”?

Yes, I agree. It happened to me, but the full story is a bit more complicated. I was happy running bOING bOING as a print zine, but in 1994 the two largest independent magazine distributors went bankrupt, owing bOING bOING about $30,000. So the Web became a much more attractive option as a way to publish. There are no printing costs, mailing costs, or inventory costs. The zine world still exists, but it’s nothing like it was in the early 90s.

bOING bOING and Mondo 2000 are cited, correctly, as being two of the seminal engines of cyberpunk–that forward-thinking, irreverent vision of “what life can be if we decide to make it so.” Rattle on, if you’d please, about the human crossover between these two great publications. Cast, character, friendships, enemies, alliances. Just go buckwild.

The predecessor to Mondo 2000 was a magazine called High Frontiers. Carla and I came across it when R.U. Sirius and Queen Mu were hawking it at a Timothy Leary stand-up show in San Francisco in 1985 or 1986. It was the poster-size second issue – with a 17″ x 11″ bright pink cover. It had a drawing of Art Linkletter’s head, saying “Kids Do the Darnedest Drugs.” It also had a 3-eared Mickey Mouse holding some blotter LSD with the CIA logo on it. It was one of the coolest magazine covers I’ve ever seen and it still is. RU was this grinning hobbit-looking character with a floppy hat with a Andy Warhol button on it. Queen Mu was a very delicate blond woman with Stevie Nicks clothes and granny glasses and she a permanent blissful smile and didn’t say much. I bought a copy and it made me fall in love with the idea of magazine publishing. Somehow I found out that RU and Mu were hosting something in Berkeley called the High Frontiers Monthly Forum and so Carla and I started going to those. They were great. Rudy Rucker did a reading for his novel Wetware at one event. He was and is one of my favorite authors. He’s the most cyberpunk of all the cyberpunk authors, because he thinks about how technology affects human relationships...

How many countries can you travel to and get an apartment and a job and start earning an actual wage for services rendered, and with it comes probable medical care in emergency situations; drivers’ licenses for non-citizens are being issued and discussed in the affected regions. We’ll let you sit in our classrooms and siphon off the knowledge of experts in their fields, whose wisdom costs much to those who pay into the system, whereas you don’t.

I see it as a kind of melanoma, which will creep in and then bore and burrow within the cellular structure and tissue and musculature, the blood vessels feeding the bone will create weakened skeletal framework. And it all comes crashing down.

Why are not Americans opposing illegal aliens in a manner which would bring them to notice of the law? If you see a human who is in your area and is not from your racial+cultural+linguistic acquaintance, and said human has no identification to prove residency in the USofA, snap a foto and call the police.

That is the minimum standard to which every American needs be performing on a daily basis while walking and traveling.

Originally commissioned by a now-defunct music magazine called Launched in year-2002, this piece has never seen proper daylight. One week after submission to Launched, the magazine was bought out by Yahoo.com, whose Editor-in-Chief disliked progressive rock, and the momentum passed. Happy The Man regrouped a year later for a brief spell, to play dates at NearFest and around the East Coast, but again died to little but fanatics’ appeal. Four of the original five members of the core of Happy The Man would respond daily via e-mail to this fanatic, perhaps amused that “a journalist” was still interested in what had been magic two decades prior. Forged has been an enduring friendship with guitarist Stan Whitaker and, especially, keyboardist/sax-man Frank Wyatt, whose collection of poems, Oblivion Sun, was published by this writer’s Far Gone Books in 2002; Mr. Wyatt was kind enough to respond via dedication of a track, titled “A Dream of Amsterdam,” on his first solo CD, A Certain Whisper. — Todd Brendan Fahey

They are spoken of in terms reserved for classical composers, of religious music. Peter Gabriel is said to shake visibly and come near to weeping when their name is brought up backstage. They have not released a new recording since 1983, and failed utterly, commercially, even in their heyday, circa 1977; yet a stroll through their Guest Book, year 2002, reads like a wet dream:

“It’s like stepping back in time,” writes one admirer; “I feel like I’ve discovered the Holy Grail,” says another. A reviewer for New Gibralter Progressive Rock Encyclopedia writes: “HTM produced some of the most stirring, complex, melodic, and MUSICAL works I have ever heard.”

I came to know of Happy The Man in 1982, while as a high school senior. An oddball–never given to New Wave or Top 40–I was addicted to progressive rock and so were all my friends: early Genesis, Yes and Pink Floyd, Gentle Giant, and maestros as John McLaughlin and his Mahavishnu Orchestra, Steve Morse and the Dixie Dregs, and French electric violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. Thinking-man’s music. Call it a “cast of mind”: Why some enjoy watching Gilligan’s Island and others prefer a Discovery Channel documentary on life in a coral reef. Who knows?

But on the day that I stopped into Tower Records, a lifetime ago, and read in the then-latest in-house Tower music magazine that Peter Gabriel considered something called “Happy The Man” his “favorite band,” I endeavored to know everything there was to know about this mysterious confederation...

His nebbish visage seems to pop up everywhere–like a “Where’s Waldo?” life-feature. I remember seeing him on CNN, whilst slugging off one last one in an airport lounge before a long plane ride to Asia in the previous century; a year later, Y2K, I would see that same earnest face in-person amidst a sea of notable folk at the DisinfoCon gathering, New York City. The guy has been around forever, before the world had heard of PeeWee Herman, and yet he considers himself a late-bloomer–receiving his Ph.D at age 50.

Students love him; he is as mischievous as they would like to be…and gets paid for it. Author of Present Shock, Douglas Rushkoff teaches us that “the future is now”; that we are in control, if we choose to be, and that a career can be made as a sort of kosher Dennis the Menace.

Todd Brendan Fahey: You have “arrived” in Academia (congratulations!). Over the years you’ve taught adjunct at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and the New School University, and word is you’ve entertained offers from MIT and other Ivy League schools–but your first “real job” as a professor is at Queens College. What kind of “life hacks” are you able to perform on/with your students, now that you have a certain modicum of stability in your role as educator? (For example, I’d probably be focusing on interdisciplinary work involving the cultivation of mushrooms…”legal variety,” of course [and then show the students how to obtain also legal psylocibin spore prints, and then let their minds take off and with a requisite completed short story at the semester’s end]; or, for the more timid class member, how to take advantage of the new micro-distillery laws and freedoms, and with a generous historical readings of “the revenuers v. Appalachian hoots-and-hallows boys.”)

Douglas Rushkoff: I’m not at New School, nor NYU or MIT, because I didn’t want to be sitting in a seminar, staring at kids I’m putting into six figures of debt for a degree. Somehow, it seemed a little hypocritical to be doing teach-ins at Occupy about student debt but then going and creating more of it at an expensive private institution.

So I went to public school – CUNY/Queens. Not even the Graduate Center, but out in the provinces. The beauty of it is that it’s cheap – like Learning Annex prices – but super brilliant colleagues who all have the same approach to this stuff that I do: it’s not about creating some professorial reputation, but making a change in the world and our students’ lives. It’s also a hotbed for radicals and radical thought. It’s where Malcolm X spoke, and where the Mississippi three (the civil rights workers who got killed) came from.

That’s the main hack: stop worrying what people think, ditch brand names, stay out of debt (you can’t even get rid of this stuff by going bankrupt) and – like Timothy Leary said – find the others. That can be the trickiest part – finding your team. It’s like finding your table in the high school cafeteria...

Transcendence is a mind-stretching and entertaining look at the international movement that advocates the use of science and technology to overcome the “natural” limitations experienced by humanity. In nearly ninety A-Z entries, Transcendence provides a multilayered and often witty look at the accelerating advances in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, genomics, information technology, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, neuroscience, robotics, virtual worlds, and much more, that are making transhumanism a reality.

The Korean Air union has recently posted a picture of a yellow card on their online community, revealing that the company has been giving out warnings to those who do not bow to executives. Accumulated yellow cards affect an employee's performance assessment, according to the union.

A union member with the ID "macadamia," posted "A sign of ‘Nutrage' posted in 2013" on the website Korean AirLine FlightCrewUnion, Saturday. The card specifies how disrespectfully a person bowed to seniors including their name, date, and place.

The periodical published by the flight crew union first disclosed the story in their 96th edition last year. The story, however, went viral after the company's heiress Heather Cho, stood at the center of criticism for the "nut rage" happening.

Cho ordered a flight back to the gate at New York's JFK International Airport last week, because a flight attendant gave her a packet of macadamia nuts instead of serving them on a plate.

Who Really Killed John F. Kennedy?– New Research into the JFK Assassination reports on the most important new research investigating the JFK assassination. After publishing in 2013 his first bestselling book Who Really Killed Kennedy: 50 Years Later - Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination, Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D. believes investigations into the JFK Assassination are close to establishing irrefutable evidence documenting the JFK assassination a government-organized coup d’état, not the act of a lone-gun assassin.

By summarizing the most current cutting-edge research on the JFK assassination, Who Really Killed John F. Kennedy? – New Research Into the JFK Assassination sets the stage for 2017, twenty-five years after the passage of the JFK Records Act, when the National Archives is scheduled to release the final, yet classified government documents on the JFK assassination. This will hopefully include over 1,000 documents the CIA still withholds from the public on national security grounds.

Dr. Corsi fully expects the final true history of the JFK assassination will expose to the American pubic the history of CIA lies and disinformation that have distorted U.S. history since World War II, in favor of a series of international conflicts and wars favored by the military-industrial complex that JFK lost his life trying to prevent.

Dweller of dark Thisworld and Otherworlds, chronicler of "street" and assembler of mechanisms to go beyond, John Shirley breathes forth a smoggy twilight that is the end of the American Dream. A novelist at 18, tutored by Dune's Frank Herbert, Ursula LeGuin, and Harlan Ellison, Shirley is the closest known phenomenon to being our Edgar Allan Poe.

Shirley can also be (and should be, though he is reticent to cop to it) credited for having discovered William Gibson—in an introduction to Shirley's book City Come A-Walkin', Gibson wrote "so carelessly shoved me toward the writing of stories, as into a frat-party swimming pool.") Because of their friendship, and with Gibson now granted by literati the mantle of "original cyberpunk novelist," colleagues will—perhaps must—measure their words.

I spoke to Shirley about his often-black craft; of his early involvement with psychedelia and cocaine addiction, then of "putting the phone down," and the creation of his newest novel, Doyle After Death.

Motherboard: How would you define "cyberpunk?" Why did this so-called literary movement bust out in a blast in the early-to-mid 1980s, stretching into the mid-90s (though we both know that Frank Herbert's Dune; Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and many of William S. Burroughs' works were written much earlier...)

John Shirley: Traditionally, cyberpunk is identified with "the street" having its own special uses for technology. By the street we mean the poor, the hustlers, criminals, the demimonde, the disenfranchised. People talk about law enforcement agencies using drones—but drones will also be used by drug dealers to watch for cops. You can order a good drone with a camera off the internet right now! I just saw a "hobby drone" used in a park.

Cyberpunk is also a tone. It's very urban, dystopian, but also about having the courage to face the dystopian world. There's a transhumanist thing going on in it too—people merging with technology...

Far Gone Books has released another controversial tome in its psychedelic catalogue. Journey to Everywhere marks a South African perspective of the synthesis of mind-altering chemicals and cyberpunk--at the pre-teething stage of what would become unveiled to the non-military citizenry as “the Internet,” before there was a “World Wide Web” and a Netscape Navigator to traverse it.

Michael Kawitzky (aka Schwann) has written a testament to both “the early adopter” and “the explorer.” Journey to Everywhere takes us back to those days of connection with like minds and souls, wherein each day opened with a new technology, time travel seeming to many as being just a few weeks away.

Kawitzky’s memoir and its synthesis of Mind-Drugs = New & Interesting Things echoes the curiosity of Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna, wherein “The Government” opened a Pandora’s Box by unleashing psychedelic drugs on unsuspecting student volunteers, prison inmates and its own military personnel and Intelligence agents over the course of the 1950s and 60s.

Writer/Producer/Director. Cyberpunk. Transhumanist. Traveler. The author survived being born in a post-war Apartheid South Africa to become a commentator on the ascent of consciousness, via social networking, from a unique South African viewpoint since the net became available in South Africa, back in 1990.

Credited with creating the words/memes; 'cybershaman/cybershamanism' and 'webtrance', his first syndicated column; 'The Schwann Column', was published by Intelligence Magazine (Hardcopy) in 1995. In 2006 he presented 'True Halluinations', a short movie, and represented South Africa at the LSD Symposium in Basel on the occasion of Dr. Albert Hofmann's 100th birthday.

The controversial prose of author Todd Brendan Fahey has garnered attention of VICE magazine, High Times, Mondo 2000, TokeSignals and other hot publications of today and yesterday.

(WireNews+Co)

Vancouver, Canada

Far Gone Books published, in 1996, Wisdom's Maw, considered to be the most-controversial American novel since William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959); the novel "factionalizes" the CIA's psychedelic mind control experiments of the 1950s to early-70s known as Project MK-Ultra. Toward this end, author Todd Brendan Fahey performed a successful Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request of the Central Intelligence Agency of its dark, Cold War-era project, as well as gaining access to the group surrounding "Captain" Alfred M. Hubbard--a US citizen and OSS operative who relocated to British Columbia, Canada and began dispensing LSD to psychiatrists and psychologists in both B.C. and Hollywood.

Fahey's research on Al Hubbard and his cadre was published as an investigative article for High Times magazine in 1991. During this era, Fahey's work was discovered by agent William Stankey, who "handled" Hunter S. Thompson; Wisdom's Maw was given 5-star reviews in the Village Voice, High Times and Mondo 2000 magazines. And then, as Mondo 2000 co-founder and editor-in-chief R. U. Sirius (Ken Goffman) puts it, in a recent interview of Todd Brendan Fahey for VICE magazine: "...suddenly it seems as if a switch were flipped downward. Fahey was championed by Hunter S. Thompson’s agent throughout the 90s, but he was unable to catch a @*&#ing break. He remains unjustly obscure, which may be a function of his whacked-out literary style."

The collection has again caught the eye of book reviewers and barely-above ground magazines and Websites. Former Seattle Weekly columnist Steve Elliot writes:

"By all rights a 'gonzo journalist' before he’d ever read Hunter S. Thompson or become aware there was such a term, Fahey’s fondness for illicit substances wouldn’t be enough to distinguish him from thousands of other would-be 'writers on drugs' – if it weren’t for his talent. And, oh what a talent it is."

R. U. Sirius compares Todd Brendan Fahey to Terry Southern, who pioneered a vein of ink-black satire in the United States in the 1950s and became known in the UK and France, where cultural critique seems to be more of a favored pastime. As was Mr. Southern, whose scandalous The Magic Christian was published in Paris to acclaim (though ignored in his own backyard), Fahey's Wisdom's Maw will be translated into Francais and released through a soon-to-be acknowledged French publisher.

Far Gone Books is publisher of the legendary Wisdom's Maw, a tour-de-force that takes the reader helter-skelter into the psychedelic world of the Sixties, where Intelligence agents attempt to create a human superman via use of LSD; most-recently, Far Gone Books has released Dogshit Park & other atrocities--a collection of ink-black satirical short stories and interviews by Todd Brendan Fahey.

Read more at http://www.wirenews.co/usa/publishing/20585/far-gone-books-receives-flurry-of-media-20-years-after-publication-of-wisdom-s-maw-the-acid-novel#xlbeC203QQvXc6hs.99

An outdoor deck overhanging the Pacific blue, Santa Barbara, California, must have been September 1988, was when I first heard of an entity known as R. U. Sirius. Whatever it was, I was told by a university-era pal who I trusted, I should pay attention.

And I said, “Are you serious?”

This hep buddy slid a half-dozen thin-paper tabloids across the table of the Sea Cove — at which we were dining on calamari and strong iced tea; the LSD was just coming on — and having flipped through the indices and a couple of interviews, I knew that he was. Very.

I don’t believe in accidents; following having pulled the rip-cord the year prior, of “life as an attorney,” I moved from Arizona and back to my birthplace of Santa Barbara, committing mineself to prose and consuming unusually large doses of acid whilst simultaneously working a 50-hr/weekly job as technical writer at a Pentagon subcontractor and engaging in my first semester as a graduate student in Professional Writing at USC, commuting in rush-hour traffic down Highway 101 and into Watts — and always with a headful. I was doing things a bit differently.

I was and had also been “an early adopter” in tech, taking a loan from my folks in 1985 and purchasing a $2,400 computer with no hard drive — just the standard 5 1/4″ dual floppies that required boot-up each time I turned the goddamn thing on, and treated always in line-command DOS. A black and green screen; no mouse; no built-in data storage.

I thought I was cutting edge. After landing in the same November 1991 issue of High Times with none other than Ken Goffman/R. U. Sirius and hanging out with him in 1997 at a Berkeley house party with John Perry Barlow holding court; at the millenium Disinfo Con(ference) in central Manhattan, with Robert Anton Wilson in “the green room” and Marilyn Manson in address via satellite connection…and of one probably-not-legal evening at the O’Farrell Theater, it was like unto following in the paw prints of Sasquatch — and watch those droppings!

MONDO 2000 and its lesser-budget wood-pulp predecessors High Frontiers and Reality Hackers merged counterculture and tech culture. How did you develop those influences?

I think I probably became a countercultural person when I was shuttled off to Kindergarten and the teacher immediately had to assert her authority in a firm sort of voice and tell us what the rules were. And I had been a little fellow who was comfortable socially with all the other little kids in the neighborhood — a bit of a leader of activities, in fact — but this freaked me out. My parents were very liberal and easy going, so I guess I was unaccustomed to stern authority. So I had a bad imprint regarding institutions right from the start. I withdrew whenever I was in one...

“You, dear reader, might as well have been abducted by an alien with a time machine to a place in history where the world was in the process of being altered by the marriage of mind and machine, plus some plants. It was an evolution of consciousness by the attempted understanding of all thoughts, all deeds, all projections, all of everything that could be digitized. And for the first time in human history, there was a grouping together of millions of people bonded by more than geopolitical or ethnic boundarisation” - Michael “Schwann” Kawitzky, Journey to Everywhere

Now, that’s some fine writing, Stan.

Michael Kawitzky (aka Schwann) has written a testament to both "the early adopter" and "the explorer." Of which he is--both. I knew "Schwann" long ago--long before most of us knew what was going on; in the pre-teething stage of what would become unveiled to the non-military citizenry as "the Internet," before there was a "World Wide Web" and a Netscape Navigator to traverse it.

Journey to Everywhere takes us back to those days of connection with like minds and souls, wherein each day opened with a new technology, time travel seeming to many of us as being just a few weeks away.

Kawitzky and I met, virtually, in around 1993, on the periphery of the nascent Web, in a USENET group of psychedelics users (and dealers) called the Visionary Plants List (VPL, for those "in the know"). And herein lies the dirty little secret of the rapid development and popularization of the Internet-turned-Web: "It was the [psychedelic] drugs that done it!" (Though The [government-shepherded, corporate] Media can and will never admit it.)

Timothy Leary remarked to this reviewer, back in 1992, that "Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were barefoot, long-haired acid freaks" pre-Apple boom, and that Bill Gates was known for having used LSD while at Harvard. Furthur (spelling intentional), Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow opined in 1997, again to this writer, "I'll go so far as to say, if the government succeeds in its War On (some) Drugs--if everyone who used marjiuana and LSD were to really be put in jails--America would not have an operational computer left."

"Schwann"/Kawitzky spells it out, in prose more eloquent than Leary did in his Neuropolitique--a tome I hold very highly, but which is surpassed herein.

A college dropout, apartheid-era South Africa, “Demoted to worker, lowest class, I entered commercial life in 1970, somewhat ignominiously, working in a large clothing factory as a lowly runner. I was unlearned scum; a disgrace to a family of mathematicians, scribes and artists.” He works his way u the spinning wheel, as a “designer of polyester women’s wear,” then, Carnegie-like, churns the bile into becoming owner of a moderately-successful clothing boutique. Kawitzky sells his shop on a chance bid for $20,000 and, with a lot of time on his hands and three children to feed, hunkers down and gets jiggy with the New Tech. He meets, by chance or of God’s design, a Portuguese cat named Azmazz, who is making a lot of noise on a flight/war simulator in the office of a gas station at which the author has come to fill his tank. And he surely does. The author has just recently purchased a computer, of which he knows zero in-toto, and Azmazz likes to turn folk on to the newest floppy disks, which they soon begin swapping like unto so many drug transactions.

As USENET turns WWW, Kawitzky adopts the nom de plume “Schwann,” and just basically starts getting noisy--in a provocative and hyper-intelligent way. He makes some friends--the Brothers McKenna, cyperpunk proto-pioneer John Shirley and this writer among them.

You, the Reader, will discover every next ripple in a heavy tide--from the Cold War inception of a year-1950 US government department which will become the Pentagon's decentralized, nuclear safe "Internet," to vastly entertaining timelines of cyber-geekdom, wild rides in a Pontiac GTO with a carbon monoxide problem through fields of mushrooms with Terence McKenna and the Maluti tribe, en passe to the sacred rock

Kawitzky’s memoir and its synthesis of Mind-Drugs = New & Interesting Things echoes that curiosity, albeit black/covert, which paved the way for Gordon Wasson's CIA-funded trips to South America and which were to turn on then-Harvard Professor Timothy Leary and open up The Sixties...and who, post-”rehabilitation,” championed cyberspace and Digital Everything! with nearly the same fervor.

"The Government" opened a Pandora's Box by unleashing psychedelic drugs on unsuspecting student volunteers, prison inmates and its own military personnel and Intelligence agents.

Those with two curious neurons occurring within his/her skull will get off on this work and benefit from the history and insight held within. Journey to Everywhere isn't "the kind of book that should be a bestseller"; this particular creation by Mike Kawitzky should be a bestseller.

It’s a peculiarity of these apocalyptic times that we don’t have any writers who can evoke the hyperreal grotesquery of 21st-century humanity with the sort of razor-blade satire practiced by our 20th-century Jonathan Swifts (Terry Southern, William S. Burroughs, Michael O’Donoghue, and Hunter S. Thompson, among others). Could it be that today’s writers just aren’t taking enough drugs, or, at least, enough psychedelic drugs?

In 1996, Todd Brendan Fahey came close with the “acid novel” Wisdom’s Maw, which he wrote while under the influence of 500-microgram doses of LSD-25. The novelist would drop as soon as his wife went to work and be back inside corporeality by the time she got home. I spent 36 years as an acid head, and it never occurred to me—that is, until I read Fahey's latest book, Dogshit Park—that the eight-hour work day is just the right amount of time to get up and come down.

I first heard of Todd when we both found ourselves in the November 1991 issue of High Times—me as a study of my odd self, Fahey for a truly jaw-dropping investigation of Captain Al Hubbard, the so-called “Johnny Appleseed of LSD” and confirmed OSS agent (and suspected CIA agent). Wisdom’s Maw swirled the story of 60s revolution with the CIA’s investigations into psychedelics as agents of warfare and mind control. And after umpty-some rejections from mainstream and alternative publishers, it was finally published, in 1996, through Fahey’s own small-press imprint, Far Gone Books. It got rave reviews in the Village Voice, High Times, and a bunch of underground magazines, but suddenly it seems as if a switch were flipped downward. Fahey was championed by Hunter S. Thompson’s agent throughout the 90s, but he was unable to catch a fucking break. He remains unjustly obscure, which may be a function of his whacked-out literary style.

I thought it high time to catch up with him.

VICE: Hi, Todd. First off, how did you get this way? In other words, what weird combinations of influences sculpted your writing style?...

It took the Korea Coast Guard 12 long minutes to answer a distress call from the sinking ferry Sewol, it has emerged, and the two sides then wasted time passing the buck to each other for who should make the decision to evacuate the ferry. It was not the ferry captain who sent a distress call but a first mate.

The first mate and the emergency call center were indecisive although an oil tanker was on standby to help in nearby waters.

The new indications of massive negligence in the disaster emerged from a transcript of communications between the Sewol and Jeju and Jindo maritime traffic services.

Coast guards search for missing passengers of the sunken ferry in waters near Jindo, South Jeolla Province on Sunday.

The transcripts show that the ferry put the distress call to the emergency services in Jeju instead of the one in Jindo, which was close to the scene, at 8:55 a.m. on Wednesday.

It was not until 9:07 a.m. that the Jindo emergency services communicated with the ferry for the first time.

Only at 9:24 a.m., half an hour after the ferry started to sink, did the two sides begin talking about evacuating. The Sewol asked, "Can passengers be rescued immediately if we order them to abandon ship?" The Coast Guard replied, "The captain should make the final decision. We don't know the situation there."

Until their final communication at 9:37 a.m., neither side had made a decision to evacuate, although the oil tanker Doola Ace had told them four times that it was on standby to help in nearby waters.

In the meantime, the passengers were repeated told over the public address system to stay in their cabins. Only around at 10:15 a.m. were they told to jump into the water, but by then the first mate and captain had already abandoned ship.

The passengers, who had put on life jackets by that time, lost the chance to escape as the ferry listed further and further to the side.

A team of prosecutors and police have started an investigation of ferry operator Cheonghaejin Marine and slapped an overseas travel ban on some 40 staff and seamen with the company.

Meanwhile, more than 20 bodies were collected from the sunken ferry on Sunday, the fifth day since the tragic accident, bringing the official death toll to over 60 and the number of missing to about 240.

(CNN) -- The "kill switch," a system for remotely disabling smartphones and wiping their data, will become standard in 2015, according to a pledge backed by most of the mobile world's major players.

Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft, along with the five biggest cellular carriers in the United States, are among those that have signed on to a voluntary program announced Tuesday by the industry's largest trade group.

All smartphones manufactured for sale in the United States after July 2015 must have the technology, according to the program from CTIA-The Wireless Association.

Advocates say the feature would deter thieves from taking mobile devices by rendering phones useless while allowing people to protect personal information if their phone is lost or stolen. Its proponents include law enforcement officials concerned about the rising problem of smartphone theft.

"We appreciate the commitment made by these companies to protect wireless users in the event their smartphones are lost or stolen," said Steve Largent, president and CEO of CTIA. "This flexibility provides consumers with access to the best features and apps that fit their unique needs while protecting their smartphones and the valuable information they contain."

HTC, Motorola, Nokia are among the other smartphone makers who have signed up, along with carriers AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint and U.S. Cellular.

The feature would let a phone's owner erase contacts, photos, e-mail and other information, and lock the phone so it can't be used without a password.

The feature, which will be offered at no cost to consumers, also will prevent the phone from being reactivated without an authorized user's consent. The data would be retrievable if the owner recovers the phone.

Some phone makers already include the ability to remotely wipe phones. In Apple's latest mobile operating system, iOS 7, a feature called Activation Lock lets users prevent their phones from being reactivated even if they're reset...